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To: inquest
What's necessary for ID to be viable at all is for there to be living forms and features that are inexplicable by any current naturalistic theory.

I see, you're making the even weaker claim that ID says that some phenomena are *as yet* unexplained by current theories. This is a god-of-the-gaps argument and not very compelling.

Scientific theories generally don't deal in absolutes like that.

They often do. Energy is conserved by every physical process. Entropy of an isolated system never decreases.

But that's beside the point. ID isn't a scientific theory so it's free to make whatever kinds of claims its wants.

1,254 posted on 09/27/2005 8:49:24 PM PDT by edsheppa
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To: edsheppa
I see, you're making the even weaker claim that ID says that some phenomena are *as yet* unexplained by current theories. This is a god-of-the-gaps argument and not very compelling.

It's essentially no different from the SETI example that was being presented earlier. If we get a signal that appears to be of intelligent origin, the first thing we'd need to do is rule out all natural explanations for it, to every extent possible. Many investigators have said in advance that one tell-tale sign of intelligent origin is if the signal consists entirely of prime numbers, because there's "no known" natural phenomenon that would produce prime numbers exclusively. But all that's liable to the same objection you're raising against ID theory: How can they know that no one will ever come up with a viable theory that could account for a naturallly occurring signal consisting only of prime numbers? The answer is, they don't. It's just a question of probabilities, as is the case in most areas of scientific investigations.

[Scientific theories generally don't deal in absolutes like that.]

They often do. Energy is conserved by every physical process. Entropy of an isolated system never decreases.

Those aren't theories you're quoting.

But that's beside the point. ID isn't a scientific theory so it's free to make whatever kinds of claims its wants.

Circular reasoning.

1,259 posted on 09/28/2005 6:47:04 AM PDT by inquest (FTAA delenda est)
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